In October of 1938, just weeks after the “Munich Pact,” Britain placed an order for 2,000 tons of mustard gas.

The last occasion on which a European monarch wielded a sword in earnest appears to have been on November 17, 1878, when King Umberto I of Italy, having been stabbed by an anarchist, defended himself with his saber, wounding his assailant, Giovanni Passannante.

As a result of heroism during the Battle of the Ticinus, in 218 B.C., 18-year old cavalry officer Publius Cornelius Scipio – later the conqueror of Carthage – earned his first decoration, the Corona civica, awarded for saving the life of a citizen in battle, in this case that of his own father, also P. Cornelius Scipio

To commemorate the service of its citizens in the Great War, the city of Charleston paid a French sculptor to carve a monument which, upon unveiling at the Battery in the autumn of 1932, showed the figures of a warrior protecting a maiden, both in heroic nudity, with the man so well “armed” that money had to be found to procure a large fig leaf.

Formed in 1903, by 1939, on the eve of World War II, the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve comprised just 809 officers and 5,371 enlisted men.

On celebratory occasions, the Ewe people of Ghana, Togo, and Benin often dance the agbadza, originally a war dance performed by men returning from battle.

Recruited in New England and the Middle Atlantic states in early 1813, Col. Zebulon “Pike’s Peak” Pike’s First Brigade (the 6th, 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th U.S.) of the Army of the North, posted on Lake Ontario, totaled about 2,000 men, included some dozens of black freemen enlisted men, and early instance of integration in the ranks.

During the Franco-Spanish siege of Gibraltar in 1782, a woman accompanying the investing forces proved so brave under fire that her husband was rewarded with a promotion, and she with a permanent pension of 5 francs a day, enough to buy nearly a dozen loaves of bread.